please empty your brain below

"depressing international visitors to ExCel for well over a year"

*All* visitors to ExCeL are depressed, whether they're national or international. They may not be when they arrive but they sure are when they get there. ExCeL brings joy to no one.
Thanks DG, very interesting; we are currently "ticking off" all london routes excluding non-TFL trains and just did the Stratford - Woolwich Arsenal route on Monday past. You've neatly explained what's going on at Canning town, we were on the lower level looking up at another DLR platform, as you say, very neat solution, Cheers, Iain
Maximum info. in minimal words - the very antithesis of waffle.
Most unusual in recent decades for public transport to be built in advance of the actual demand, I remember how desolate and empty everything seemed 25 years ago along this extension

Even now the line isn't over busy really, development of this part of Docklands has been a comparatively slow process. Indeed if it wasn't for ExCel, this line would be very quiet
You can hardly have "a surfeit of regal titles in the old Royal Docks". It is the Royal Docks. It needs as many regal titles as possible to justify its name.
"reconfigurement" -- I prefer "reconfiguration"
Prince Regent station has Royal associations going back further than the Royal Docks, as it is named after Prince Regent Lane, which runs from there to Plaistow.

The first of the Royal Docks did not open until 35 years after the end of the Regency.
As a semi-regular user of Royal Albert station, I've often wondered why it wasn't expanded to fit 3-car trains at the same time as everywhere else, given it's not on a particularly constrained site, and with lots of development planned in the surrounding area.
Another great post. I did wonder why TfL didn’t commemorate the anniversary themselves - but then why the need when you’re there to do it!
No dlr station at Canning Town until jubilee line extension built . The north London line station was to the north of the A13 , until rebuilt . You can see the tenants of the retaining wall of the original dlr alignment if you look up from the Stratford bound jubilee platform. The original alignment was more to the west until the station was built.
Canning Town - I remember that the original DLR alignment was at ground level, with the building work for the current station taking place alongside, then there was a closure to connect the new high level DLR line, for a brief period afterwards you could look down on and make out the former alignment from a Poplar bound train.

Because of the building work I'm not sure if the Beckton branch had a weekend service when it first opened.
Great post DG. As a former Beckton resident I used this line every day to get to work. I find the game of the station so interesting, nice to know the origins!
My mum moved in to Beckton around about 1983 - she was a pioneer! She lived there until her death 3 years ago. I do remember the excitement of the arrival of the DLR extension - until then getting to her part of Beckton had involved a tube to East Ham and then a 101 bus to Savage Gardens. For me Beckton and the DLR always has a slight look of an artist's/architect's impression rather than a real place. It does seem incredibly low density now - especially living as I do in Stratford.
The original plan was for the line to go direct from Royal Victoria to East India over the Leamouth crossing. The local MP Nigel Spearing spearheaded a campaign to redirect it to stop near the North Woolwich line station at Canning Town
It's my recollection that the line was originally a shuttle from Poplar and it took seemingly ages to finish off the connections to allow a through service from central London. (Was it always Tower Gateway only or were there some Bank services back then?)

@StillAnon The DLR didn't run at weekends until well into the 1990s, after the Beckton branch opened. Even then this branch didn't get a weekend service at the same time as the rest and I can't remember when this was fixed.










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